In the wake of the Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka, observers are highlighting that the country has a complex ethnic and religious makeup with a long history of violence, as minorities have tried to find their place under majority Sinhala rule.

Advocacy Director for Tamil advocacy group People for Equality and Relief in Lanka, Mario Arulthas, says even since the end of the long war against the Tamils 10 years ago next month, tensions and violence have been a constant backdrop.

Broadcast:
Tue 23 Apr 2019, 5:23pm

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Mario Arulthas, Advocacy Director for the Washington DC-based People for Equality and Relief in Lanka, and Human Rights Fellow at the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership

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LINDA MOTTRAM: Observers are cautioning that the Easter Sunday attacks should not necessarily be seen simply as Muslims versus Christians, amid indications that a small, little known Muslim group, with international help, carried out the attacks.

Sri Lanka has a complex ethnic and religious makeup and a long history of violence as minorities have tried to find their place under majority Sinhalese rule.

Mario Arulthas is the Advocacy Director for the Washington DC-based People for Equality and Relief in Lanka, a Tamil advocacy group, and he's a human rights fellow at the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership.

He says even after the end of the long war against the Tamils, ten years ago next month, tensions and violence have been a constant backdrop.

MARIO ARULTHAS: It is not a straight forward Christian versus Muslim, as what you see in many other countries, but actually Muslims have been targeted by the Sinhala Buddhist majority for the last 10 years.

And meanwhile Christian minority groups especially those of Protestant denominations, evangelical denominations were attacked and actually if you look at reports released last year including by the US government, 2018 so a sharp increase in attacks on Christian churches by Sinhala Buddhist groups.

The last attack was actually just a week ago at a church in central Sri Lanka where a Mass marking Palm Sunday was attacked by Buddhist groups.

LINDA MOTTRAM: So this is well outside of past patterns, isn't it? I mean can we locate it in the history?

MARIO ARULTHAS: No, we cannot. The history of violence against Christians, the history of violence against Muslims and against Tamils does not fit in with these attacks.

This is a completely new form, so to say, of attacks that we are seeing.

However, the risk of these attacks is that they exacerbate the existing tensions and this was probably one of the intentions of the attackers — that this will increase the existing divide between these, you know, the very complex relationship between these groups.

LINDA MOTTRAM: And so we've also seen officials naming hitherto little known Islamist organisation of domestic origins in Sri Lanka as being part of this. Again, we're not clear but what do you make of that, the naming of that group and what are the, are there risks involved in coming out with the name of a particular organisation at this point?

MARIO ARULTHAS: This particular organisation is actually not very well known.

As you said it's a very small group however the local community where this group is based has protested against this group as long as two years ago.

In 2017 the Muslim community sat on the street with placards calling on the government to arrest these people because they were influencing the children in a bad way and they were calling them terrorists and they were calling them jihadis.

However that did not gain much traction in Sri Lanka. It wasn't covered widely in the press in Sri Lanka and I think the authorities just didn't take this very seriously but what you can see now is that suddenly the Muslim community is blamed for not having said anything before when in fact they have.

Even three years ago when these concerns were raised, it was said, 'Hey there's a risk of a radicalisation among the Muslim population,' it was often dismissed by people who thought this was born out of Islamophobic tropes or you know, intercommunity issues rather than something that's actually a substantial threat.

So it's interesting to see that the government has ignored those concerns by the community itself in the past but also the recent intelligence that suggested an attack was planned and this seems to be a complete failure of the government to act on intelligence they'd received.

LINDA MOTTRAM: So what should the Sri Lankan government do now if it's to keep the threads of Sri Lankan society together?

MARIO ARULTHAS: I think there's a larger issue in Sri Lanka where many of its citizens do not feel a part of the state because a singular Buddhist nationalist identity of what it means to be Sri Lankan has just not gelled well with, especially the Tamil community, and there's always been since the 1970s has been propensity for separatism, that the Tamil people wanted to separate from the state.

In the Muslim community, of course, it wasn't as pronounced however if you look at some of the propaganda that these groups that are now reported to be the attackers, what they have put out as, it is actually against the Sinhala Buddhist nature of the state and they're using that to radicalise the population too.

So I think Sri Lanka itself needs a reckoning about how it sees itself and the identity of the country itself and whether it really wants to be a Sinhala Buddhist majoritarian state or truly pluralistic country.

LINDA MOTTRAM: Mario Arulthas from People for Equality and Relief in Lanka and he's a human rights fellow at the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership as well.